The Hit List

To be honest upfront, I was a user of Cultured Code’s Things but I got annoyed, frustrated and dissatisfied with the roadmap and progress of Things, both on the Mac and iOS front. Things’ Cloud-based Sync has been in the works for nearly 2 years and a private invite-only beta has only just been launched, syncing between Macs only. Their development speed and customer responsiveness regarding its future development plans is just plain awful.

Surprisingly, The Hit List (THL), once seen to be abandoned for being untouched for 2 whole years, suddenly came back to life and graduated to a version 1.0 release. In addition, Cloud-based Sync was functional and available out of the box, albeit not free (but affordable). Cultured Code and Things still do not have anything to show nor deliver.

I jumped at migrating to THL immediately since I already had a license to it from my MacHeist bundle, and the architecture of Things limiting my workflow and organisation of tasks had already got me looking for alternatives. THL is immensely more flexible and resilient.

I bought the THL iOS app the moment it was announced to be approved and redeemed my MacHeist complementary 3 months free Sync subscription.

Setting up sync was a breeze on both the Mac and the iOS application. Fill in your username and password and an initial full-sync will be performed. Subsequent syncs are blazingly, unbelievably fast. Even faster than the WiFi sync solution that Things has.

Overall, the THL iOS app is a good subset of the features available on the Mac, nothing missing of show-stopper severity, and I believe that most user feature request will be satisfied in subsequent updates.

If you’re wondering between Things, THL, and OmniFocus, here’s an analogy that you might want to consider. Things is the simplest and least complex (possibly more restrictive) of the lot, while OmniFocus is the most complex and flexible (possible feature overloaded and expensive). THL falls between the two applications nicely, with a good price. So, if you find OmniFocus too complex and want something slightly simpler, THL may be the task management application that you’re looking for. Give them all a whirl to see what suits you best.